The S-Word Won't Pay the Rent

Fifteen House Democrats spent this week publicly insisting they are “capitalist, not socialist.” The letter, aimed at drawing a line between the party’s center and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic socialists after his sweep of the New York primaries five days ago, contains no policy, no child-care proposal, no mention of rent. It is fifteen people defending a brand while the family in Queens is choosing between the subway pass and the prescription copay. The word doesn’t pay the rent.

Mamdani, sworn in at the start of the year on a promise to govern “expansively and audaciously,” said on Sunday that he and his Democratic socialist allies are carrying a “national message” to working Americans “coast to coast.” Both sides are arguing about the word. The word is a flag, and the flag is doing the work, and the work is not the work.

Concede the half. The Cold War payload on the letter S is real. Communism as it was actually built in the twentieth century was a catastrophe — Russia, China, Cambodia, tens of millions dead, the workers it claimed to liberate crushed by the people claiming to liberate them. I am not here to relitigate it. A Dane in Aarhus does not have to clear that freight before breakfast. An American in Scranton does, every time the word comes up. That is a real obstacle to building anything that works.

Now watch the trick. The trick is the empty assertion on both sides. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” said fifteen members of Congress, as if that sentence were a position on child care. “We are carrying a national message,” said the mayor, as if the sentence were a bill. Neither one is a policy. Neither one is a child allowance.

Here is the part the catechism of the comfortable skips. The country that calls itself most loudly capitalist is also the country that has — quietly, grudgingly, without ever using the word — built the most expansive social-democratic infrastructure in its history. Social Security is universal old-age social insurance. Medicare is single-payer health care for everyone over sixty-five, and the people who love it most are the ones who have used it. The public library is the most quietly radical institution in the country, and it has been sitting on your corner the whole time. The rural electric cooperative wired the countryside when the investor-owned utilities would not. The credit union in your wallet is a member-owned, not-for-profit financial cooperative, and you have been paying its better rate for years without once attending a Politburo meeting. The Bank of North Dakota has been a state-owned, profit-making institution since 1919, and nobody has ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty nearly in half — from 9.7% to 5.2% under the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure — in a single year. It lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty. We turned the policy off and the poverty came back. We already do this. We just will not say the word.

The fifteen House Democrats who signed the letter know all of this. They voted for the Child Tax Credit when it existed. They hold town halls where seniors thank them for Medicare every week. They are not, in any operational sense, the people they are trying to sound like. They are defending a brand. The brand is fine. The brand is not a child allowance.

And the mayor — whose “New Deal understanding” is a fine North Star — is light on the receipt. The 1930s version of that bargain was paid for by union density we do not have, organized employers we do not have, and a state capacity we spent the last forty years defunding. The North Star without the plumbing is a slogan.

Here is the plumbing. A universal, monthly child allowance — the one we already ran and proved. Active labor-market policy, the Danish kind, that retrains and relocates a laid-off worker before the layoff becomes a catastrophe. Sectoral bargaining, the German kind, that sets a wage floor across an entire industry so a single firm cannot win by going non-union. Codetermination, the German kind, that puts workers on the corporate board. A public option for health insurance that lets people choose a non-extractive provider and lets the market decide whether the extractors can compete. Postal banking, the American kind until 1967, that gave the unbanked a checking account at the post office. A sovereign-wealth-fund-on-public-resource, the Alaska kind, that sends the dividend from extracted oil back to the people of the state. A credit union that keeps the money in town, member-owned and not-for-profit. A union that negotiates the price of labor so a thousand people don’t have to beg one at a time. None of this is from a country with a different climate and a smaller flag. Most of it is American, or used to be. The Nordics didn’t abolish the market; they welded the trap doors shut with concrete institutions like Denmark’s flexicurity model, easy to fire, impossible to fall. We don’t have to wait for a revolution to do the same. The menu has more than two items on it. We just have to decide to order.

This is harder here than in Copenhagen. The honest version of that is not “it can’t be done.” The honest version is that the institutions underneath the policy have to be built before the policy can carry the weight, and that building is slow, unglamorous, and mostly local. American federalism is fifty laboratories, not one machine. American union density is roughly a third of what it was in 1955. American campaign finance hands outsized power to concentrated money. American racial division has been used, for a century, to break the working-class solidarity that built the original New Deal in the first place. None of that is a reason to give up. All of it is a reason to stop pretending a label is a program.

A child allowance is a child allowance. A credit union is a credit union. A public library is a public library. A union is a thousand people negotiating one price together, and we do not call the farmers Bolsheviks when they do the same thing at the grain elevator. The family in Queens does not need a brand. She needs a subway pass and a strep test for her kid that does not require a sales transaction. We can build that. We have built most of it already. The argument we are not having is the one that matters, and the rent is due on the first.